| Author/Contributor(s): | Maddox, Brenda |
| Publisher: | Harper Perennial |
| Date: | 9/30/2003 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
The remarkable life of the physical chemist whose pioneering research unlocked the structure of DNA and the double helix.
In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin's data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery.
Driven by an uncompromising devotion to empirical evidence, she investigated the structure of coals in wartime Britain and mastered X-ray diffraction in post-war Paris.
At King’s College London, her meticulous research separated the two forms of DNA and yielded the breathtaking diffraction image that guided her competitors to the summit.
Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
- Women in Science: Traces Franklin’s upbringing in an intellectual Anglo-Jewish family and her education at St Paul’s Girls’ School, in an era when academic establishments long withheld titular degrees from female scholars.
- History of Science: Uncovers the fraught departmental politics at King’s College London, where mismanaged laboratory oversight and strained collaborations led to her crucial X-ray diffraction plates being shared without her knowledge.
- Molecular Biology: Follows her prolific final research at Birkbeck College alongside Aaron Klug, deciphering the internal architecture of the tobacco mosaic virus and advancing modern virology.
- Science Biography: Reclaims Franklin’s legacy from the distorting caricature popularized in James Watson’s 1968 memoir The Double Helix, restoring the full portrait of a dedicated and passionate investigator.
- Also by This Author: Nora and Yeats’s Ghosts.